07/26/2009

Here are two interesting videos by our own Mike Gazzaniga. The first (see here) is a recent interview with folks from the NSF--which addresses the various ways neuroscience could impact the law. The second (see here) is a bloggingheads.tv discussion between Gazzaniga and Carl Zimmer. Happy viewing!

I just stumbled upon a really interesting talk by philosopher Dan Dennett at Edinburgh University in 2007 entitled "Is Science Showing that We Don't Have Free Will?" It's certainly worth the watch! Regardless of whether one agrees with his philosophical positions, he is an engaging speaker who always draws a standing room only crowd. If you'd like to know more about his particular views about free will, see here and here.

07/24/2009

Over at WIRED, there are two interesting recent stories. The first is about the possibility of "brain hacking"--i.e., the malicious misappropriation of neural implants. The second is about recent research at the University of Wisconsin involving "twitter telepathy"--i.e., using EEG to send a "tweet" telepathically rather than inputting it manually with a keyboard!

I thought I would post a few links to some interesting videos I have stumbled upon during the past couple of weeks--some of which are more obviously related to neuroscience, philosophy, and the law than others! If you have your own interesting video links to share, please let us know in the comment thread:

07/23/2009

Here is a recent report about work being done on "mind reading" with the use of fMRI by researchers at UCLA and Rutgers. According to the report:

"In the study, 130 healthy young adults had their brains scanned in
an MRI scanner at UCLA's Ahmanson–Lovelace Brain Mapping Center while
they performed one of eight mental tasks, including reading words
aloud, saying whether pairs of words rhyme, counting the number of
tones they heard, pressing buttons at certain cues and making monetary
decisions. The scientists calculated how accurately they could tell
from the fMRI brain scans which mental task each participant was
engaged in.

"We take 129 of the subjects and apply a statistical tool to learn
the differences among people doing these eight tasks, then we take the
130th person and try to tell which of the tasks this person was doing;
we do that for every person," said lead study author Russell Poldrack,
a professor of psychology who holds UCLA's Wendell Jeffrey and Bernice
Wenzel Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience.

"It turns out that we can predict quite well which of these eight
tasks they are doing," he said. "If we were just guessing, we would get
it right about 13 percent of the time. We get it right about 80 percent
of the time with our statistical tool. It's not perfect, but it is
quite good — but not nearly good enough to be admissible in court, for
example."

For more on using fMRI and mind reading, see here and here. And in the event that you missed it when it aired a few months ago, the 60 Minutes piece about the issue can be viewed here.

In the event that you have some extra time this summer, you might enjoy checking out some of the lectures and courses on subjects ranging from law and psychology to philosphy that are presently available via iTunes U. The following universities have an especially impressive amount of free material available:

The death
of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak
havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to those who
believe that free will and determinism are incompatible…it would mean that
people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets.
Anything would go.

--Dennis Overbye, The New York Times (2007)

This is the excellent foppery
of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own
behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if
we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves,
and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an
enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a
divine thrusting on--an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his
goatish disposition on the charge of a star.

--William Shakespeare, King Lear (1610/2005)

During the past
few years the popular press has become increasingly interested in free will,
agency, and responsibility, with stories appearing in mainstream media outlets
such as The New York Times, The Economist, Forbes Magazine, Wired,
and FOX News. As psychologists continue to demystify the
mind by uncovering the mechanisms that undergird human behavior, what was once
an issue that fell mostly under the purview of philosophers and theologians has
started to pique the curiosity of the public more generally. This interest is quite understandable. If free will provides the foundation for our traditional
moral beliefs and practices, and its existence is incompatible with the
gathering data from the so-called “sciences of the mind,” then free will isn’t
just a topic fit for philosophers—it is a psychological, sociological, cultural,
and policy issue as well. To the extent
that scientific advancements undermine or threaten our traditional views about
human agency, we ought to carefully consider what impact this might have on our
moral and legal practices.

07/22/2009

When it comes to the sciences of the mind, free will, and
moral responsibility, some people already believe that there is a revolution
under foot. Others are understandably
less sanguine. According to the former
view, as scientists continue to demystify the mind by identifying the cognitive
mechanisms that undergird human behavior, the traditional picture of free will
and moral agency could be torn asunder.
According to the latter view, while recent and future discoveries in psychology
and cognate fields will surely shed new and interesting light on how the human
mind works, they will largely leave our traditional views of agency and
responsibility intact. Two different
central questions arise on this front. The first is descriptive—namely, what effects will future developments
in psychology likely have on the way we view ourselves? The second is normative—namely, what effects should these developments have?

Obviously these two questions are intimately
related. Perhaps the key unifying issue
is whether the gathering data from the sciences of the mind merely help explain
human agency or whether they actually carry the seeds of a paradigm shift in
how we think about free will and moral responsibility. Needless to say, it is a very exciting time
for researchers who are interested in these issues.
Only time will tell whether those who counsel revolution, or those who
defend the traditional picture of free will and responsibility, are largely
correct. In the upcoming months, this is an issue I plan to explore on this blog in some detail. In the meantime, I thought I would post a couple of links to some recent work that is relevant to the thorny issues that arise on this front.